From The Times
Magazine, Saturday 31st July 1999
Return of the Bluesman:
Peter Green has been to hell
and back. The founder of the superband Fleetwood Mac disappeared into a haze of
drug abuse and mental institutions at the height of his fame. But now he has
emerged from the wilderness with a new band, a new album - and some scars that
will never fade. Alan Franks meets a rock survivor. (Photographs by Paul Massey)
For a rock music comeback to be
more implausible than Peter Green's, it would need to involve resurrection. This
is the guitarist who founded Fleetwood Mac, a group which, for a period in its
late-Sixties heyday, was out-selling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Green's
life story since then has been so full of darkness and disappearance that he was
regularly assumed to have joined the celestial supergroup with Elvis at the
microphone, John Lennon on guitar and Keith Moon behind the drums.
His was not just another sad
decline, for at his best he was reckoned to be as good a player as any thrown up
by the English discovery of electric blues. When he joined John Mayall's
Bluesbreakers, an essential training ground of the period, he proved himself to
be as passionate in his performing, as inventive in his soloing as his immediate
predecessor, Eric Clapton. Some said he was the best of the lot, never mind
Clapton, or Jeff Beck, or even Jimi Hendrix.
His fall was proportionately
great, involving drug damage, schizophrenia and mental institutions. For a while
he worked as a grave digger. He went abroad, to Germany, Israel and elsewhere.
There was an incident involving a shotgun and his accountant. There was a wife,
and a daughter whom he never sees. There were half-remembered wanderings and
tramp-like appearances outside church halls. The outer suburbs of London come
and go in these years but the order of them is indistinct. He grew bloated and
grey, and frightened children off with his mandarin fingernails. It was said he
has given all his money away, and wanted nothing to do with the new flood of
royalties that came with the re-release of his greatest hit, Albatross, in the
late Eighties. The hair turned to wisps and he took on the air of a gentleman
vagrant forever putting distance between himself and some unbearable
circumstance.
And now this, a hardly believable
return to gigs, albums and international tours. It has been going on quietly for
a few years, with tentative appearances at modest festivals. The shows may have
been small, but the response was huge. In no way was he playing as in the old
days, but as he eventually says himself, that was never the idea. The applause
was for simply being, as much as for having been.
For all these reasons, his
appearance on stage is the oddest affair. His name is forever tied to the shout
and wail of a young man's blues. It still conjures images of skinny frames and
Seventies hair. Now this Dickensian publican moves sedately towards the
microphone and looks as if he is about to sing. This performance by Green's new
band, the Splinter Group takes place on a Friday lunchtime at Tower Records in
the underground complex at Piccadilly Circus. Some of the shoppers are surprised
to find a concert being set up among the shelves. They see these portly men
doing a sound check, and move on to the dance racks. Others, mostly older, know
exactly who there are watching, and can hardly wait until he gets a solo break.
He starts like a man picking his
way back along overgrown footpaths. His hand knows where to go on the fretboard
but it won't be rushed. He shuts his eyes as if he is summoning memory as a
guide. It comes, slowly and not quite surely, but it does come. There are
autograph hunters who might be grandparents, and they approach him with
reverence.
One of the women watching is
Michelle Reynolds. She is the same age as he, 52, and was once married to
Fleetwood Mac's first manager, Clifford Davis. She is one of the long-standing
friends who has helped to rehabilitate him. another is her brother, Nigel
Watson, his co-manager and fellow guitarist with the Splinter Group. Today,
Green has a room in Reynolds's house at Warlingham in Surrey. He plays along to
records or the television on one of his 46 guitars. She says it is rather like
having a very gifted teenager living in, and although there is not a romantic
link between them, she is intensely fond of him, and remembers his kindness of
long ago. Apart from doing the cooking and the laundry for him, she helps him
when he is on the road. She knows as well as anyone that there is a voyeuristic
element in the audiences, just as there is in audiences of the concert pianist
David Helfgott (subject of the Oscar-winning film Shine), but she insists that
it soon gives way to straightforward appreciation. His playing, she says, is
getting better by the month.
Green's real name was Greenbaum.
He was the youngest of four children from a Jewish family in Bethnal Green in
the East End of London. His father was a postman. While he was at school the
family moved to Putney, in south London, and Green worked for a while as a
butcher before turning professional. By the time he was 24, and leaving
Fleetwood Mac, he had written a string of hit songs for the band, starting with
Black Magic Woman in 1968; Albatross went to the top of the UK charts later in
the same year, and Man of the World and Oh Well reached number two in 1969. When
he went his own way, Fleetwood Mac embarked on a hardly less erratic course,
with members coming and going like soap plots, and love tangles upstaging their
musical lives. He has no more reverence for them than for himself. He reckons
they look like a bunch of clowns, with Mick Fleetwood, the drummer, a man on
stilts, and Danny Kirwan, the guitarist and singer "like Bluebottle from
the Telegoons".
Before meeting him I had been
warned that he is still apt to nod off. Until a few years ago he was on
medication, and it took a while for him to get over the soporific effect. Some
said he was asleep 16 hours a day. We have lunch with a mutual friend at Chelsea
Arts Club. The bar has its quota of drinkers who have damaged themselves in the
more conventional way. He is slightly confused by the place, and he falls into
long silences among the dark wood of the dining room. They can appear like
another form of opting out, but the friend assures me he is happy sitting
quietly in his own reverie. After lunch he is not sure how long he might want to
talk for, but once he has started, there is no stopping him. Years, names,
places, people litter the air. Sometimes they seem to be tumbling out of the
bottom of a dream, and sometimes they are tethered to reference points.
Not long into our conversation I
realise I am talking to that rare thing, an utterly self-effacing rock star. Any
more effacing and he would surely become invisible to himself. Perhaps that is
what happened in the past. When I suggest that he being too modest about his
attainments, he shakes his head in disagreement and says he would accept the
word humble. "Humble before God." When I remark that there was some
very interesting music being made by the bands of his youth, he replies at once:
"Not by us." His flat delivery makes this hilarious. Talking about
money, he freely admits to being "a disaster area...but I survive from day
to day. Any day I could hear them say I haven't got any, and then I'd have to go
and find a job. I'd probably look through the music papers and get work in a
group. I'd have to shrink my opinion of myself down. Like Rod Stewart sings in
that song, 'Find myself a rock'n'roll band that needs a helping hand'. I could
use my name, and say I used to be with Fleetwood Mac."
He remembers once going into a
timber yard to get a job. "I decided I would go out and work, build houses,
do something practical for this society, this country. Something solid. I did
get to the yard and they said come back later and we will probably fix you up. I
kind of got the job. You imagine you can do it and it's not as heavy as you
think. But sometimes you need two or three [people]. They do look quite strong,
those blokes."
If stories like this sound as if
they have an important bit missing, it is because they have. The bit is him.
When he went to the timber yard, he was on one of those LSD trips that were to
damage him almost beyond repair. The timber yard story goes into this: "We
tried to repeat this trip, a successful trip, but it didn't' work. There were
some people who came along, and they acted, well, not exactly hostile, but....he
thought I was after his girlfriend. It all backfired. This wasn't a whole trip,
not enough to get things going. I was trying to get back to this other one,
which was a week previously."
It is unnerving. Of LSD he says
without hesitation: "It was my downfall." Barely seconds later he
continues: "There has to be something good about it to make such a big,
you. I mean, the Beatles haven't cancelled their recommendation of it, have
they? Well, it wasn't a recommendation as such, but they haven't downed their
use of it. And psychiatrists use it, don't they. Of course, you can have a bad
trip, where you roll up and scream."
Was this the case with him?
"No, it's just I wish I hadn't done it. I had nothing but good trips, but
they didn't agree with me. I didn't take the whole tablet, just a tiny little
bit. It was working. I did feel good, and with pure intentions. If there is
something to be gained by LSD, I hope I did gain it. If there is nothing to be
gained, then it is just a hallucinatory drug, and you hallucinate your poor
brains away. I don't do anything like that these days. I don't drink, I don't
haunt the pubs, I don't smoke cigarettes. I thought maybe I could do chocolate
liqueurs, but last time I got horrid pains in the chest and felt sick."
The drug messed him up
appallingly, even though he says he probably took no more than four or five
trips. It drove him through a series of mental hospitals, electro-convulsive
therapy, and years of shambling, blank despair. Yet now, apparently touching the
serenity which was an ideal of his generation, he harks back to it as a man
might hark back to a devastating but unmatchable love affair.
Without romanticising his
condition, the integrity seems to have survived all the ravages. There are no
delusions of grandeur about his past status or the significance of what he does;
not even a mildly heroic sense that his life has been as much of the stuff of
the blues as a white English boy's life can be. We come back inevitably to the
business of money. Was it really true that he was pushing it away as fast as it
came to him? The unreliability of rumour and the lapses of his own memory left a
gap which was filled with mythology. The idea of a rock star on the run from the
fruits of his success was too strong to resist.
"I wasn't actually trying to
give all my money away," he says. "It's easy to give money away.
What's stopping me? What I said was that I wanted to be someone who contributes
in his lifetime. It was when there was all that terrible stuff going on in
Biafra, and I did want to help. The rest of the band didn't want to do it. I
thought that perhaps we could live in a commune, like other groups did, and give
away the money that we didn't need for ourselves. They said no, and as I was on
a little bit of mescaline, organic stuff, I said I'm going to do it
anyway."
In 1977 he was committed for
treatment after going to his accountant's home with a .22 rifle, apparently bent
on resisting the payment of royalties due to him. "I can't understand how
they reverse everything," he says, with a hint of paranoia. "It can't
be on purpose, can it? They put a story in the papers with me going round and
preventing him from giving me a cheque for £30,000. The whole thing was that I
wanted money."
According to the Jewish Chronicle,
Green once turned up at the offices of the Jewish Welfare Board, asking it if it
would like some money. Not recognising him, and pitying him for his dishevelled
look, the receptionist referred him to the department for relief of the needy. A
few weeks later he played concerts which raised thousands of pounds for that and
other organisations.
When asked if there was a faith
that brought him through the worst times, he replies: "I have a strength of
some kind. I don't know. I'll have to think about it. I can't answer that by
firing at it. I won't get an answer that impresses me."
Even if he never gets round to
impressing himself - and he leaving it late - he has done the trick with the
Rhythm & Blues Foundation of America, which has given him the W.C. Handy
Blues Award for his 1998 album, The Robert Johnson Songbook. It is the first
time that this honour has been given to a UK musician. He was also voted the
third-best guitarist in the world by Mojo magazine in 1997 after Hendrix and
Steve Cropper of Booker T and the MGs. Even if you detect in this acclaim some
collective will to claw back a past greatness, it would be hard to dismiss all
12 tracks of his new album, Destiny Road, the first to feature new material for
nearly 20 years. Occasionally, there are bursts of the terrific fluency, the
indefinable feeling born of confidence, technique and other virtues which Green
insists he lacks.
I ask him what drew him to the
blues in the first place and he says, typically, that he could give it up.
"Too dark and dismal for me." Then he goes without a join into a
reminiscence of wandering about in New Orleans and being asked to play the
guitar in a pub called The House of the Rising Sun. "But I'm a white
person, I know nothing about the blues." Then he is talking about credit
cards, and how he is not allowed them, and about the lawyer who used to take the
alimony payments from him and leave him with what he needed. Again it starts to
sound like the English counterpart to a Delta bluesman's hard-luck story. Except
that Green could do himself down quite well enough without help from anyone
else.
Peter Green and the Splinter Group
are about to embark on a summer tour of Europe. A British tour is planned for
October. Their album Destiny Road has just been released on Artisan.
Thanks to Angela Morris for
transcribing this.